We natter on these days about how people are becoming social online. But we have always been social; the Internet merely provides more ways for us to connect with each other. What’s truly new is the opportunity for companies, especially media companies, to be social.

I spent much of last week in the company of a social corporation — Burda, the German media giant (where I have consulted). In Munich, New York, and Davos, its chairman, Hubert Burda, throws parties where he delights in bringing together the most interesting, creative crowds. I’ve seen his company benefit from bringing in new experience, talent, ideas and relationships.

Last week was Burda’s biggest party, the Digital Life Design (DLD) conference in Munich, with 1,000 media people trying to figure out their future. And the theme I heard strung through much of their discussion was about how to rethink media in social terms.

Socialising on the Web

Web technology is social. Facebook announced at DLD that they had just begun a private test of international versions in French, Spanish and German. What’s different is that the users in these countries will be the ones doing much of the localisation, using a new Facebook application and voting together on the best rewording.
Search is turning social. Well, it has been from the start, since Google’s algorithms depend on our clicks and links. According to Google’s Marissa Meyer, at DLD they work to “model the human idea of relevance.”

But now entrepreneur Jason Calacanis has started a human-edited search engine, Mahalo, with 60 staff and 400 freelancers inclluding readers’ efforts. Outside editors’ credibility is measured with the help of social means.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is starting another, Wikia, where the users will write even the algorithms. Calacanis predicted that the “fat tail” of search — the few thousand most popular terms — will be handled by human editors, the “medium tail” by a combination of algorithms and social effort and the famed “long tail” of small niche terms will be served automatically (that, he leaves to Google).

The two founders differ over their relationship with their editors. Mahalo pays and Wikia doesn’t. At DLD, Calacanis sniped at Wales for this, “I'm a writer by trade and I take offence when people try to devalue writing.” Wales responded by saying, “Nobody works for free. What people do for free is have fun...We don’t look at basketball games and people playing on the weekends and say these people are really suckers doing this for free.” Content and work can be social.

Coelho’s draw

Art is becoming more social. Author Paulo Coelho told the DLD media crowd that he put one of his books online for free and it was downloaded an astounding 100 million times. As a result, he now encourages pirates to snatch his other books and firmly believes that improves his sales. “For the first time in my life I can interact with my readers,” he exults. But he also says that when he’s sitting alone writing, 100 million readers is an abstraction. So on his blog, he invited 10 readers to an annual party he throws in remote Spain. To his astonishment, one flew in from Japan, another from Iraq.

There was much discussion at DLD about distributed advertising and content networks, which are about people working together. There was talk about Facebook’s ad program that ties ads to friends’ activities. Google’s Meyer showed an incredible amount of geographic data provided to Google by users. Yahoo showed off the wisdom of its crowd that finds the most interesting photos on Flickr.

But then there’s Martha Stewart. The famed American doyenne of domesticity insisted in a presentation to DLD that she, too, is social. Except her performance was bizarrely anti-social as she hijacked the stage to show off her suitcase filled with gadgets — all sealed in Ziploc plastic bags — taking up twice her allotted time and forcing her interviewer, Tyler Brûlé, creator of Wallpaper and Monocle, to act as her porter. Martha bragged that she blogs and has Facebook and MySpace sites but warned that she doesn’t talk with people there. Well, not everyone in media is social.

The Guardian